NEW YORK -- In the latest effort by a federal regulator to force the mortgage industry to stop treating desperate homeowners like vagrants looking for a handout, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday proposed new standards meant to force loan servicers to mend their ways.
The earliest loans of medieval times were either forced loans or personal borrowing by the sovereign.
Regimes printed their own currency and forced "loans" from merchants and bankers.
Forced loans had been taken earlier, but Edward IV discarded even the pretense of repayment, and the word benevolence was first used in 1473 to describe an extorted gift.
Terray then began to stabilize the finances by repudiating part of the debt, suspending payments on the interest on government bonds, and levying forced loans.
All his predecessors had collected "forced loans" at times of imminent crisis when there was no time to await parliamentary elections, returns, and the vote of subsidies.
The citizen-soldiers risking their lives at the front had to be supported by any and all means back home, including forced loans on the rich and punitive vigilance against those suspected of disloyalty.
The most persistent and lucrative taxation after 1285 was that imposed on the clergy, generally in the form of tithes (taxes on income) and annates (taxes on property); sales taxes, customs, tallages on Jews and foreign businessmen, and forced loans likewise supplemented older revenues of the domain to support increased administrative expenses as well as costs of war.
States raised revenues through property taxes, gabelle (e.g., taxes on contracts, sales, transport of goods into and out of town), and forced loans (prestanze), while they developed sophisticated measures, including the consolidation of state debts into a form of national debt, to service long-term deficit financing.
In the 19th century, European imperial powers forced loans on China, Egypt, the Gulf, Iran, and Latin America.
